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Monday, July 7, 2014

Syria: 6.6 million children are in need of help

Approximately 6.6 million children are victims of the crisis in
Syria and are in need of help, as announced yesterday by Unicef, which
fears that a lack of resources will force reduction of their assistance.

"It's a scary number that is growing very, very quickly" warned a
spokesman for the organization, Simon Ingram, during a press conference
from Geneva.

"The numbers of July 2014 show an increase of two million
compared with June 2013" he added. Of these 5.1 million children live in
Syria and 1.49 million are refugees, according to Unicef. Furthermore,
the organization has only received 37% of $ 770 million, which it sought
to provide assistance to children in need, as denounced by Ingram. With
the onset of summer and particularly elevated temperatures in the
region, Unicef is very concerned because of the lack of resources for
programs relating to water supply and sanitation. "For example, in Iraq,
Lebanon and Jordan, there is a high risk that water supply services and
sanitation will be discontinued due to lack of funding" while the risk
of spreading diseases transmitted through water, such as polio, is
increased, according to the spokesman.

On Thursday, the UN released a report stating that the number
of refugees in Lebanon is expected to reach 1.5 million people in late
2014, more than a third of the country's population. "It's like the
entire population of Romania's 19 million people to migrate to Britain
or France with a population of 63 million inhabitants and 67
respectively" the Minister explained.
Lebanon, a country of four million inhabitants, has received the
largest number of refugees in the region, who currently reach 1.1
million. "The proportion of the Syrians exceeds 35% because we also
compute unregistered refugees, while in Turkey they are just 1.2% of the
population, in Iraq 1.4% and 18.5% in Jordan" he underlined.

He added
that public primary and secondary education in Lebanon now consists of
88,000 children from Syria over 85,000 children from Lebanon itself or
other countries. Moreover, in a large hospital in Beirut in May "80
births were recorded from Syrians, while only 40 from Lebanese". In
order to limit the influx of immigrants from Syria, he reiterated his
call to set up a camp on the border between the two countries and not in
Lebanese territory. According to the World Bank, the Syrian refugees in
Lebanon cost $ 4.5 billion a year.